Week 4 Blog Post

This week’s reading, Thomas Poell and José van Djick’s “Social media and activist communication,” explores the changing dynamics of activist communication since the advent of widespread social media use. They categorize these changes under two primary trends – acceleration and personalization.

Acceleration can be characterized as the tendency for social media to focus on immediate, spectacular events rather than long-term analysis and greater systemic understanding, a tendency the authors believe “runs the risk of shifting the perspective of online activist communication from the actual protest issues to the protest spectacle.”[1] Furthermore, the authors believe that this trend increases the potency of the dialectical relationship between social media and mainstream media, with many “many mainstream and alternative news sites” adopting “the form of social buttons,” more closely resembling their social media counterparts.[1] In turn, “social media reporting practices tend to mirror much criticized mainstream reporting by focusing on the violence and spectacle that accompanies many protests.”[1]

The other trend Poell and van Djick make note of is that of personalization. In many ways a complementary trend to acceleration, personalization has multiple aspects. Personalization encompasses the tendency to centrally frame "individuals’ own narratives rather than collective identity.” Activists, rather than adopting the identity of being but one individual who’s part of an issue-centered social movement, instead touch on multiple movements and issues from their own individual perspectives and take the shape of “digitally networked individuals with multiple affiliations.”[1] Personalization also “revolves around easy-to-personalize ideas” rather than “formal organizations and collective identity frames” creating a feeling of connectivity that is much more fragile and short-lived than the bonds created outside of social media.[1] These two aspects, when viewed together, can bring to mind the concept of para-social relationships – internet personalities can make statements that are easily personal, but the feeling of connectivity is merely one-sided and lacks the strength of a true social relationship.

The issue I am focusing on – climate justice – is no less affected by these trends than any other online space. Examples of the trend of acceleration in regards to climate justice can include the tendency to focus on specific disasters – floods, wildfires (such as those in Australia or California), and hurricanes – with less emphasis being given to long-term systemic analysis, such as the international cooperation and economic reorientation over time requisite to more effectively tackle the issue of climate change. In considering this event-based perspective, one can also make note of the trend of personalization. Posts regarding events of environmental devastation have a worldwide reach and are certainly spread further than they would be without social media. Users of social media may give a personal donation to an organization in response – a positive action, to be sure – but one that will produce a transitory feeling of connectedness and will not serve to build a network or community in the same way that on the ground volunteers might.

Works Cited

Poell, Thomas & José van Dijck (2015). Social Media and Activist Communication. In The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media, 527-537, edited by C. Atton. London: Routledge.